Ubiquitous Computing

Time and Place: Tuesdays 4:30-6:00pm,
Room 102, College of Computing

The general focus this quarter is on ubiquitous computing. We will
spend half of our time looking at work outside of Georgia Tech
and the other half focussing on particular efforts within the
FCE Group.

Schedule

4/1

4/8

On March 23-24, Gregory Abowd and Bill Schilit
(FX-PAL) hosted a workshop on Ubiquitous Computing as part of
the activities for the CHI'97 conference in Atlanta. We will
provide an overview of what went on during that 2-day workshop.

4/15

On alternate weeks this quarter, we are going to have a discussion
on work inside of FCE by one of the various FCE Lab researchers. To
kick-start things this quarter, Gregory will provide an overview FCE
research activities outlining a number of emerging research
themes.

The analogy to salvage is a
good one. Just as physical objects become set in a linear geologic strata
over time, so do media artifacts. By uncovering these layers in a
meticulous fashion, and under a strict methodology, context may be observed
and information gleaned. By capturing media with many time stamped
contextual cues, one can later sift through the layers with much more speed
and accuracy.
This research focuses on the creation of tools to accurately capture the
fluid communication of a meeting, and then utilize the multimedia records
within a larger work process. By observing a subject at PARC over a period
of several months (after he had been given time to become familiar with the
system), they observed the development of multiple salvaging strategies.
These strategies became extremely integrated with both the act of capture
and retrieval. This integration of activity may be the most compelling
results to emerge from the study.

We touched on some of this research the other day, speaking about the
string which wiggled in response to network activity. While the original
implementation of the Live Wire was done by an artist in residence at Xerox
PARC, this is a good example of Ishii and Ullmer's concept of background
information display. Pushing the idea of foreground/background
communication, they propose the three key concepts of Tangible Bits:
interactive surfaces, graspable physical objects, and ambient media.
There is some very interesting associated with this research, with no key
concept receiving more attention than the other. Graspable icons (phicons)
are being used to symbolize real world objects, as well as store data.
They are being associated with ubiquitous environments as well as with
traditional optical displays as alternatives to wimp input. particularly
interesting is their allusion to the use of light, shadow, and transparency
in future displays.

During the seminar we were talking about the "Sound of the Net Breathing" site
and I also mentioned a book on ambient noise/music called "Elevator Music."
Here are more detailed references.

Joseph Lanza, "Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening
and Other Moodsong" (Picador: New York), 1995.

4/29

Design/Representation issues for UbicompBob Waters

Our overriding theme will be on issues of design and representation of
the services (OS and Comm) that might be necessary to support ubicomp.
For operating systems, we have the challenge of providing complex
services with a device that is bandwidth-challenged both in peripheral
and communications support. For multimedia nomadic services, the
authors look at how best to provide personal services such as paging,
fax, telephone, etc in an environment where the user is not
stationary. Finally, for those of us who are software engineers, the
representation of ubicomp systems that dynamically change
configurations based upon users will be a real challenge. Our current
box and arrow methods work great for static systems, but how will we
handle dynamic ones?? That's the issue the third paper tackles.

So come to class Tuesday where the topic will be : "Fitting 20 pounds
of stuff in a 5 pound bag" or "Everything I ever wanted to know about
the PI calculus, but was afraid to ask".

Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer. Dynamic Structure in Software
Architectures. In the Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SIGSOFT
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
(SIGSOFT'96/FCE-4), San Francisco, CA, pp. 3-14, October 1996.

5/6

Traditionally, data sonification has been concerned with creating
interfaces for the visually impaired and for providing means of monitoring
data when the user's vision sense is otherwise preoccupied (as in a jet
cockpit or in a surgical environment). While none of the writings below
address ubiquitous computing, per se, I think the research suggests many
ways that we can reach the goal of an "invisible interface" with the world
in a future computing environment. Sonified data has many advantages over
visualized data that seem appropriate for an interface that has no physical
characteristics. I'd like to highlight some of the ways that data
sonification could benefit (and, in fact, could be inappropriate for) a
ubiquitous computing device or environment.

5/13

AROMA (a project which
explores _peripheral_awareness_ as a way of supporting distributed
communities). Available outside gregory's door. it's also in the CHI '97 proceedings, pg. 51. When reading AROMA, try to think about what sort of data streams we
might gather in the home.

5/20

Classroom 2000: Ubiquitous computing in educationJason Brotherton

Readings

Multimedia'96 paper

Pointer to C 2000 Web pages

This week's papers give a brief look at context awareness and voice-only
applications. I'll be talking about Savoir, a project I'm working on
(originally prototyped by Anind Dey and Lara Catledge) that gives
voice-only access to e-mail, news, weather reports, stock quotes, etc.
I'm currently working on using position and orientation data to enhance
the ability of the voice-recognition system in doing it's job. We'll be
talking about the basics of this project as well as the basics of
voice-recognition and what context means and can do in this area.
The papers are:
"Context Awareness in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing"
~abowd/papers/wearable/context.ps
and
"MailCall: Message Presentation and Navigation in a Nonvisual Environment"
www.acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/papers/Marx/mtm_txt.htm

5/27

SavoirRob Orr

Readings

Dey, Orr and Abowd. Context Awareness in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing. Paper submitted to First International Wearable Computing Symposium.